


Smoke and Mirrors

by Tammaiya



Category: Tokyo Babylon, X -エックス- | X/1999
Genre: Angst, M/M, Unhealthy fixation, between TB and X
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-28
Updated: 2004-12-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 18:59:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7904005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammaiya/pseuds/Tammaiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With nothing from his old life left to hold onto, Subaru decides it's time for a change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smoke and Mirrors

If you can’t beat them, join them.  
  
If you can’t have him… be him?  
  
It is probably not the most logical of conclusions, but then again, Subaru is not in the most rational state of mind. It’s excusable. After all, one way or another, he has just lost the only two important people in his life in one paralysing blow. Essentially, Subaru as he had been is destroyed: he had never been strong or assertive, and his self had in a sense been reliant upon those he loved to shape it.  
  
In a sense, the old Subaru had died with Hokuto.  
  
It is time for a change; there is no question about that. Subaru can’t stay the same after trauma like that, not when he’d been so naïve and accepting. Therefore, it instead became an issue of how, not if. Thus Subaru was led to his leap of flawed logic: he couldn’t have Seishirou, so the next best thing must be to look like Seishirou.  
  
As it stands, Subaru still loves the older man, despite being aware of his true nature. It creates dichotomy, contradiction, love and hate fighting each other for control but love always, always wins, even though he wishes it didn’t.  
  
If he can still see Seishirou in the mirror, then he isn’t losing him entirely.  
  
It is a viewpoint impossible for any sane person to understand, but it makes sense to Subaru. It never occurs to him that he had originally looked like Hokuto; it never occurs to him that perhaps this choice stems from a subconscious desire to move from the unbearable pain of seeing the one killed in his reflection to the masochistic satisfaction of seeing the killer, the lover, one loss to another.  
  
Nevertheless, it might still have occurred to him that what he is about to do is very disturbed.  
  
Scissors reflect dully in the dim light, cold metal against warm skin. Snip, snip, and soft dark locks fall lifeless to the floor with the last vestiges his youthful innocence. Shorter hair suits him, or perhaps he simply wants it to. It is not childish, though. It is like Seishirou’s hair, short but not too short; that is what counts.  
  
There is still something missing.  
  
Subaru looks in the mirror, and he carefully watches the faint echoes of the man he loved. Something missing, what is missing, what doesn’t he have?  
  
Seishirou’s ghost reflection smirks at him. Subaru does not smile back. He is not Seishirou, and he will never be Seishirou. He is trying to look like him, not become him entirely. He doesn’t even know how to smirk. He isn’t going to try.  
  
In Subaru’s distorted vision-memory, Seishirou tilts his head mockingly and lifts a cigarette to his mouth, blowing smoke lazily through the air with a silent chuckle. He could be saying something; his mouth is moving; it isn’t important.  
  
Seishirou smokes.  
  
Smoking is not something an obedient boy like Subaru does. Smoking is bad for you; smoking is for rebels. Smoking is for the effortlessly cool carelessly malicious antihero of the story, in this age.  
  
Seishirou, in other words.  
  
Subaru doesn’t have the first clue about smoking: how to hold the cigarette, how to inhale, how not to choke. He only vaguely understands the concept of brand being important, and he certainly has no idea what Seishirou smokes. It wouldn’t matter to him in any case; no doubt the collected, detached assassin has expensive cigarettes, just as he wears expensive suits. Subaru can’t afford such luxuries.  
  
It was easy enough to get a pack. Too easy, in a way; it makes Subaru nervous, as though there has to be some kind of trick. This is Japan, however: the nation where you can buy anything from a vending machine and no one is there to check your ID. The only thing that has ever really been stopping him, had he ever previously been inclined to smoke, is his own mind.  
  
Subaru eventually manages to light the cigarette, fumbling clumsily with the lighter, and of course his first breath is too deep and causes him to hack and cough and feel like he wants to throw up his lungs. He’s holding it wrong, he’s breathing it wrong, he can’t do this.  
  
He’s not Seishirou.  
  
He sees, in his mind’s eye, the elegant curve of Seishirou’s wrist as he holds the cigarette loosely between two fingers, the slow graceful arc of Seishirou’s hand to his lips.  
  
Subaru is not a child any more, age aside. Subaru has had his innocence stripped from him, and now he realises what he had always been unaware of before in his youthful oblivion: Seishirou is a very attractive man. It seems a stupid realisation to make, somehow, something he had technically already known, but it’s only just struck him that his knowledge had simply been on an intellectual level.  
  
There is a long distance between the intellectual and the real. Seishirou is hot, in a dangerous, sensual way, and it has taken until now for Subaru to actually grow _aware_ of this. He hadn’t been equipped to deal with a revelation like that before, he suspects. His mind wasn’t wired to think that way.  
  
Now all the wires are snapped, tangled in a mess, and the revelation hits Subaru with the dull weight of a ten ton anvil: he wants Seishirou.  
  
This is quite possibly the worst moment to figure this out, when everything he sees is overlaid with visions of Seishirou but the reality is gone. In his mind the assassin takes another deep breath from the cigarette, but this time all Subaru can do is focus helplessly on his mouth.  
  
What would that mouth look like, swollen from kisses? What would it taste like? How would it feel, pressed against Subaru’s own mouth?  
  
Subaru’s fingers raise hesitantly to trace his lips, which tingle slightly. He’s never thought about things such as this before now. Maybe once or twice he wondered what it would be like if Seishirou were to brush a kiss across his lips, but the thought has always embarrassed him and he had immediately tried to forget that it had ever occurred to him. Now, however, it is like a floodgate has been opened: Subaru can’t afford to be as straight-laced as he had been, and Seishirou is not nice any more. He’s certainly not safe.  
  
As far as Subaru had been aware, Seishirou would never do anything truly improper. Now, though, Subaru realises that Seishirou is, quite possibly, the kind of man who would be capable of molesting a boy as young as Subaru himself. He’d simply chosen not to.  
  
That concept sends a thrill down Subaru’s spine, and he knows it’s wrong, wrong to be turned on by something so immoral and someone who killed his sister, but he couldn’t stop loving Seishirou and now he can’t stop being attracted to him either. He’d find that the attraction is even tied to the nastiness, if he were to analyse it.  
  
He doesn’t want to. Instead he wonders what would have happened if Seishirou had chosen differently. If Subaru had won the bet. If, if, if, would be could be should be.  
  
Subaru’s hand strays downwards before he consciously realises what he’s doing, buttons on his jeans flicking open (sober black, ordinary cut, Hokuto isn’t here to dress him now and whose fault is that?) and bare skin feels impossibly hot against his palm.  
  
Bizarre as it is, he’s never done this before. It’s only recently that he even found out people did this kind of thing, let alone considered doing it himself. He had a sheltered upbringing, after all. He wonders how Hokuto manages (managed managed don’t forget) to be so outgoing and unrestrained compared to him.  
  
In his head, Seishirou’s smirk deepens and he takes another breath from his cigarette. _Wrong time to be thinking about your sister, Subaru-kun._  
  
But he’s not thinking about Hokuto, not really, because the only thing he sees when he closes his eyes is Seishirou’s eyes, Seishirou’s mouth, Seishirou laughing mockingly and pushing him back on the bed.  
  
He doesn’t have the first clue about what is supposed to happen next, not really, but his imagination isn’t entirely helpless. It can fill in some of the blanks with ease (what does he want what feels good what seems right) and the ghost of Seishirou’s mouth is almost tickling his throat if he lets himself forget. Seishirou has a gorgeous mouth, Subaru decides, sensual like his movements, and Subaru wishes he could kiss it, be kissed by it, let Seishirou bite at his neck.  
  
Wouldn’t that hurt?  
  
Would it matter if it did?  
  
Subaru has hit his rebellious phase too late. It’s the wrong time for everything, but most of all it’s the wrong time for him to finally get a sex drive. He doesn’t care.  
  
He’s working on instinct. He’d been worried that maybe people learned about this kind of thing somehow and he’d just missed out on it, but it actually seems to be working pretty well. Soon enough he’s too lost to remember what is real and what’s in his head; his right hand becomes Seishirou’s hand becomes Seishirou’s weight Seishirou pressing down on top of him dizzy dizzy can’t think straight is this what ecstasy feels like?  
  
Only now he’s coming down and his hand is sticky and everything feels cold. Seishirou is not there; Seishirou will never be there, never again and never like that, and though Subaru tries to look like him all he really looks like is a lost debauched boy who’s trying to be something he’s not.  
  
He’s got a long way to go before he grows up enough to survive, Subaru realises, and somewhere inside of him something solidifies into diamond hard self-protection. Beneath that, though, his heart is tender. Vulnerable. It’ll always be soft inside, like the caramel centre of a chocolate.  
  
It has to be, because that’s the only place where Seishirou remains and Subaru’s not ready (not now not ever) to let go.


End file.
